Forum - View topicThis Week in Games - A Very 35th Birthday for Sonic The Hedgehog
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AiddonValentine
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-Sonic: Ah, there's the baffling decisions from Sega we all know and tilt our heads at. This is also why you don't try to force celebrations when you have nothing to show.
-Blazblue: O...kay? Blazblue is one of my favs so I'm not complaining but that's seriously out of left field. Wonder who they're adding; maybe Torakaka, or Rachel's alt-universe counterpart Racquel? |
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Silver Kirin
Posts: 1772 |
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Yeah, the thing with anniversary/milestone celebration is that, while some people may thing it's a bit silly to celebrate a certain number, most fans do believe that a company has to show something to coincide with a certain event, and Sonic did have some major celebration in the past with the announcement and/or release of a new major game, like Sonic Adventure 2, Sonic Generations and Sonic Mania, though unfortunately, the ifamous Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) was also released to coincide with the series' 15th anniversary, so maybe SEGA should take their time in developing a new mainline 3D Sonic game, though it's been years since the last major one and fans have beeng hyping that SEGA was going to announce a new game. |
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BadNewsBlues
Posts: 7214 |
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Wish we had this when Sonic Unleashed was getting smeared with nothing but bullshit like it was as bad a game as the GBA port of Sonic 1 or Sonic 06 the game it followed.
To be fair people have spent more time asking for more 2D style Sonic games than Adventure and they’ve gotten it them. Even if Mania was a rather lazy throwback while they were somewhat indifferent to Superstars aside from Jun Senoue’s contributions to the soundtrack which they stomped all over.
People didn’t learn their lesson after DRIV3R to stop attaching this ___killer moniker to games. Last edited by BadNewsBlues on Fri Jun 26, 2026 6:21 pm; edited 4 times in total |
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Beatdigga
 Posts: 5156 Location: New York |
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No mention of the physical pinball table? Think of all the Sonic Spinball jokes to be had!
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BadNewsBlues
Posts: 7214 |
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I assume it doesn’t come with an arrangement of the options theme 
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AiddonValentine
Posts: 2963 |
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When said table is made by bigoted company Jersey Jack, mentioning Spinball would be a disgrace to Spinball |
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Silver Kirin
Posts: 1772 |
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I have to say that my relation with Sonic is a bit different, I was born two years after the first Sonic game came out, and here in Latin America many people kept playing old consoles, albeit pirated clones, the first game I remember playing was the original Super Mario Bros. on a Famiclone, but I had a friend with a bootleg Genesis and I played some Sonic games, but since I never experienced SEGA's marketing campaign from the early '90s I never saw Sonic as a direct competitor to Mario, to me they both coexisted in harmony. Never once in my mind I thought Sonic was inherently cooler/ediger than Mario, to me they were more like cartoon characters, though it speaks a lot about the early video game industry when a mascot character like Sonic was advertised as agressively as it was, it's something that could never happened these days. Though I think I also watched some episodes of The Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog cartoon even before playing the first game, and the Latin American Spanish dub of that series mistook Tails for a girl so that confused me a lot when I saw Sonic X years later
I have to say that when my English skills improved and I got access to the Internet and rediscovered some of the games I played as a small child, I was fascinated with some of the info I discovered about Sonic's creation and early marketing. Don't know if I was a bit disappointed when I discovered that the main reason for Sonic's creation was that SEGA desperately wanted a character to defeat Mario in popularity, when you think about it kind of sounds like the plot of The Simpsons' episode, "Itchy, Scratchy & Poochie", but at least Sonic Team was comprised of talented artists and programmers and the first Sonic game ended up being a great title, but I was also amazed to discovered that despite being created in Japan, Sonic wasn't very popular in his home country since his series was meant to appeal to Western gamers, but I also couldn't believe that SEGA of America felt the need of giving the character a new backstory and change certain elements like Eggman's name (side note, the Robotnik name change never bothered me since in the Latin American Spanish dubs of the early Sonic cartoons they also changed his name). I actually want back to playing the original Genesis Sonic games in my teenage years and I still enjoyed them, but then I got a PS2 and played other of his games like Heroes, Shadow the Hedgehog and the PS2 version of Unleashed and I didn't like them that much, I think part of the reason is that I never felt like I had full control of the characters when I played them. Don't know if SEGA should have stuck with the 2D formula like some other franchises like Mega Man did, but I understand that in order to stay relevant from the 32/64-era onwards all games had to make the jump into 3D and like this article says, it's kind of miracle that Sonic is still around, for better or for worse. I do also believe that Sonic's popularity has overshadowed the rest of SEGA, though it varies depending on the region, in some countries the Master System was fairly popular and in others people remember games like Wonder Boy, OutRun, Daytona USA, etc.
Wait a minute, nobody remembered Donkey Kong until his appearence in the Mario animated movie? But Tropical Freeze's Switch port was fairly popular and he still had tons of appearences in Mario games. Though I sometimes I do think a lot of people tend to only remember DK as being one those characters/games from the Golden Age of video games like Pac-Man, Space Invaders, Q-Bert, etc. |
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BadNewsBlues
Posts: 7214 |
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That’s the thing the Tropical Freeze port was a port of a game from all the way back in 2014. Meaning it had been over a decade prior to Bananza’s release that Donkey Kong had a new solo title……which is still substantially less time compared to Super Princess Peach And Princess Peach Showtime at 18 years. And yet people are flummoxed at Nintendo not announcing a new solo Mario title. |
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Doubleclouder
 Posts: 166 |
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Don't do what? Say Sonic has bad games? I don't get it. Is this a joke that Sonic fans have low standards or something? Or some toxic positivity thing? Genuinely confused here and not sure what the joke is. My favorite Sonic games are the original 1-3 on Mega Drive and SA1+2. I guess I'm one of those annoying people but I feel like Sonic never really returned to those glory days. Maybe it has long past. Mania was good but recycled a lot of the good era of games. I do wonder how hard it is to just make new 2D Sonic games. Did Mania not do well? I always thought it did. Ah well. |
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Purple Tentacle
Posts: 50 |
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I'm kind of hoping BlazBlue stays in the past. Wasn't a fan of Strive both from a gameplay perspective (too simplified) and how they basically re-designed and rewrote all the characters for the worst (and to be more cosplay/merch/FGC friendly) Last thing I'd want to see is Litchi or Taokaka in full bodysuits and unable to do their booby lady gag anymore because FGC chairmen whine about it. A new DLC 10 years later is kind of funny though, although maybe it's a sign of some foreboding presence...
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Silver Kirin
Posts: 1772 |
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This is just me speculating, but I do believe there's a bad case of toxic positivity amongst Sonic fans, the worst recent example was in regards to Sonic Racing Crossworlds with tons of people positioning it against Mario Kart World, honestly, the amount of videos saying that Crossworlds was going to beat MK World in sales are really funny in retrospect, but most of them were from grifters that wanted ammunition to make clickbait videos against Nintendo, not that Nintendo didn't deserve some criticism, but it felt so weird the fact that some were trying to weaponized people's devotion to Sonic to combat Nintendo like if it was the '90s, though SEGA of America did make a promotional video referencing the famous Blast Processing ad campaign to promote Crossworlds, which kind of aged horribly considering that MK World has sold over 15 million copies while Crossworlds didn't meet SEGA's sales expectations, but the thing is that Sonic is a multiplatoform series, you'd think the series would sell more than Mario since it's available on more platforms, but maybe at the end of the day Sonic, being more of a kid-oriented series, has a more limited sales potential, at least when it comes to spin-offs, the thing is that I sometimes believe that Sonic's online presence gives the impression that he's more popular than he really is, don't get me wrong, he's popular, but he's not system seller. And in regards to Sonic Mania, take this with a grain of salt, but I've heard some rumors that while SEGA did allow the making of the game, they didn't like the fact that a ascended fan game was better received that their in-house titles. Don't think this is actually true, but now that I think of it due to the new Star Fox remake, I don't know why SEGA doesn't just hire a Western studio to remake the Adventure titles. |
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BadNewsBlues
Posts: 7214 |
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It’s not hard to do people seem to forget Sonic Pocket Adventure which was a precursor to the Sonic Advance games. The issue seems to be people expecting a 2D Sonic game that’s evokes the feelings of the Genesis era games while also feeling fresh.
Even without Saudi Arabia’s involvement in some parts of the video game industry the idea that you need to sexualize or fetishize female characters to make them interesting is a mentality that needs to stay in the past itself. People have gaslit themselves into thinking stuff like this was why they got into certain games when it never was. |
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invalidname
 Contributor Posts: 2554 Location: Grand Rapids, MI |
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Which makes it another year late, but who’s counting. The game only made about 65% of its crowdfunding goal, so it’s kind of a miracle they’re finishing it at all. The really surprising news is that the latest gacha game Muv-Luv Girls Garden is also getting an international release, adding English, Traditional Chinese, and Simplified Chinese. The international version appears to be Steam-only, as opposed to the current browser-based game (which also has an 18+ version). Anyways, maybe This Week in Mobile Games can run with that news tip. What seems to be going on behind the scenes is that after eight years of abject failure under Avex, the aNCHOR division (formerly “ixtl”) that manages the Muv-Luv IP was declared insolvent and sold to DMM, who were already running Girls Garden and seem to be interested in making a go of the franchise. |
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